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Talk:How Skills Work
Designer's Notebook: Making Interaction Skills Work for Your Group" Especially since d20 Advanced describes rules for resolving social interactions with Interaction skills like Persuasion, it's very important for you as the GM to find a good balance between how much the dice count for and how much the player's words count for when it comes to social interaction. Some groups prefer it when it all comes down to roleplaying and eloquence on the part of the player (since it's a roleplaying game, after all), while other groups are happier when the dice matter more (as not every player out there is going to be as gifted a diplomat as his or her character with 5 Charisma and 10 ranks of Persuasion is). Is it better that everyone be able to play a silver-tongued swashbuckler at the price that masterful roleplaying can go unrewarded because of a poor die roll, or is it better that the players' roleplaying always comes first with the understanding that this makes interaction skills largely worthless? Finding the right balance between the die roll and the player's roleplaying is critical. There are a few good compromises to help get you started: * '''Dice as the Cue: Before you start roleplaying out the interaction, you make your appropriate skill check. If you roll poorly, you should roleplay that result accordingly. For example, should you roll a natural 1 on your Persuasion check to talk your way out of arrest for drunk driving, you might accidentally commit a social taboo, or stutter unconvincingly, or just throw up on the officer's shoes. The dice determine how you'll play out the scene, but they don't bar the opportunity to roleplay. They're just a cue, much in the way that hitting or missing on an attack would be in combat. * Roleplaying as the Modifier: Another option is to use the player's roleplaying of the situation to provide a Bonus or Penalty to his or her roll. The Persuasion skill takes this approach by default. In this situation, you roleplay out the interaction first. If it's a good job, you might give the character a bonus to the check (with the modifier depending on just how good of a job the player did, ranging from 1 bonus for a fairly convincing argument to 3 bonuses for a near-perfect proposal). Similarly, you might assign 1 penalty for a poor argument, or 3 penalties for an attempt which consists entirely of "I lie to the guard". * We Don't Need No Steenking Social Skills!: You might also decide that you'd rather not have the dice impact in social interactions at all. In that case, your group may simply want to remove the persuasion skill from the game. Or, going to an even greater extreme, you might even want to remove the whole Charisma ability, and instead drop the Destiny skill and move the Will resistance to Awareness and the Focus skill to Intelligence. In this style of gameplay, the results of an interaction are entirely dependent on how well the GM judges a player's roleplaying of an argument to be. There remains a danger of the social aspects of the game becoming "GM-May-I?", so be cautious in such an extreme approach unless it's the direction the group prefers. JackelopeKing (talk) 21:31, March 2, 2012 (UTC)